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Nanoparticle-assisted STED nanoscopy with gold nanospheres

We demonstrate stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy with 20 nm gold nanospheres coated by fluorescent silica. Compared with previous demonstrations of STED with a hybrid plasmonic fluorescent label, the current implementation offers a substantially smaller label and a better resolution improvement of up to 2.5-fold beyond the diffraction limit of confocal microscopy. This is achieved at approximately 2 times lower intensity than conventional STED based on dyes alone, and in an aqueous environment, demonstrating the relevance to bio-imaging. Finally, we also show, for the first time in this context, a 3-fold reduction in the rate of photobleaching compared to standard dye-based STED, thus, enabling brighter images.